Apple's Efforts to Automate iPhone Assembly Detailed in New Report

When I see a facial reaction like this on a YT thumbnail, I don't click through

it already costs them like 20 bucks to make an iphone. how much more profit do they really need?

Infinite. When I was 16 I had a flat tire on my bike and being out in the country, I thumbed it & got picked up by Dick Burke, president of Intrepid Corp, which owned Trek bicycle co. I told him how impressed I was about how Trek became the biggest blah blah blah. Instead of accepting my flattery he explained how a company can get "too big", at which point the business starts to look like a big money funnel, and attracts the most unethical kind of shortsighted businesspeople who think the entire point of a company is anything for a buck, consuming everything in sight if it makes the owners one extra cent. They'll screw up your product lines and long term plans, cut costs on materials until your product QA goes to hell, replace all the human beings with machines, jack up the prices, and use all the $ to overpay the top brass, attracting the "owner class" to gamble their kids college money on your ability to do it again indefinitely. Dicks idea was that a business equally serves the customers as it does the employees. The point of a good business is to provide the most possible good for the most possible people, so the happier your customers are, the more people you can hire and pay well, and the better that company is doing. I can't imagine anyone having the guts to say the words "shareholder profits" to him while he was alive.

I went on to work for him for a few years before he had to retire and finally passed away. I got a detailed look at how dysfunctional corporate culture can get before the company became unrecognizable. Today, about 5min across from where I teach product design is the business school, preaching the heirarchical, unlimited power/wealth, infinite growth model to a new class of kids every 4 months with religious fervor. Enjoy it while it lasts I guess.

You couldn’t replace “Apple” with just about any company.

Once everyone is out of work, they won't be needing these massively complex production facilities. The customer base will be shrinking down by a lot. Everyone racing to automate and eliminate jobs seems to be forgetting they need customers with money to consume whatever they are producing.

This is probably Apple insulating itself against the possibility of having to exit China in a tariff war. Robotic assembly is one way to bring iPhone assembly to the United States. With American cost of living and wage expectations and unions, we’d be paying double or more for an iPhone. Cut the required number of workers by half and it suddenly starts to make sense.

Steve Jobs said in an interview before he died that iPhone production would never move to the US but the cost of assembly labor was not the main issue. Apple, at the time of the interview, needed about 50,000 associate-level industrial engineers to solve manufacturing issues. China is very good at churning out armies of associate degree level engineers in a way that the US just doesn’t. That was what Jobs cited as the biggest barrier to US manufacturing.

Automated robotic assembly doesn’t require suicide nets

Apple is a $2 trillion dollar company

Why do you think market valuation of a company's equities is important in these matters?

When it comes to manufacturing the costs are constrained by cash flow.